How Sharksnip Works
A walkthrough of the platform — from your first day as a free user to a Premium subscriber running live picks every slate.
TL;DR
- Free forever to build, train, and backtest models. Live picks are the only paywall.
- $10/wk Weekly for live picks (picks-only, football-season friendly). $30/mo or $299/yr Premium for everything — Sharp calls, DFS optimizer, props, full Consensus, API.
- Sharp calls = one-click ML helpers (Optimize Weights, Diagnose, Auto-tune). Free tier gets 1/week. Premium gets 25/mo. Top-up at $1/call any tier.
- Consensus = weighted aggregate of every house model. Tip of the iceberg goes to free; the full feed is Premium.
- We're not a sportsbook and we don't sell signals to books.
Every number on Sharksnip is built on rows like these — 35,000+ NFL plays from 2024 alone, run through the same pipeline that feeds Tinker, Consensus, and the Picks page.
1. Free signup (Sandbox)
Anyone can use Sharksnip free, forever. The free tier (Sandbox) gives you:
- Full Tinker access — train and backtest unlimited models in your browser
- The picks page with our predictions across NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL (1-week delay on real-time picks)
- Multi-book pickem unified line shopping (PrizePicks, Underdog, DK Pick 6, Kalshi — pick the cheapest payout)
- A bet tracker that auto-syncs from 30+ sportsbooks
- The top consensus pick per slate (a teaser of the full Consensus product)
- Discord access (general channels)
The only thing paywalled is live picks from your trained models. Building, training, backtesting — all free.
2. The three pricing tiers
Sharksnip pricing is simple by design. Pick the row that matches what you actually want:
| You want… | Tier | Price |
|---|---|---|
| To build, backtest, taste 1 Sharp call/week | Free / Sandbox | $0 forever |
| Live picks from all your trained models — picks only, no AI tools | Weekly | $10/wk |
| Everything: live picks + 25 Sharp calls/mo + DFS optimizer + props + full Consensus + API | Premium | $30/mo or $299/yr |
| One additional Sharp call (any tier, any time) | Top-up | $1 per call |
There's a free 7-day Premium pass if you sign up for a sportsbook through our affiliate links — that's funded by the books, not by you.
Why Weekly exists
Lots of bettors only play during football season (September–February). They don't want to commit to a full month or a year — they want live picks for the weeks they're actually betting. Weekly solves this: $10/wk, live picks from every model you've trained, auto-renews, cancel anytime in one click. It's intentionally picks-only — no Sharp calls, no DFS optimizer, no builder tools. If you want any of those, Premium is the upgrade.
Why Premium is $30/mo
One tier, everything in it. Live picks from all your trained models, 25 Sharp calls per month (rolling forward up to 50), the DFS contest optimizer, prop predictions for all books, the full Shark Snips Consensus with dispersion and market-divergence alerts, rate-limited API access, and the VIP Discord. Annual is $299/yr — a 17% discount and the best deal we offer.
3. Sharp calls — the killer feature
Sharp calls are button-press AI helpers inside the model builder. You don't write a prompt. You click a labeled button. Claude does the ML work behind the scenes and shows you a before/after preview. You accept or reject the change.
The buttons (initial set)
| Button | What it does | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Optimize Weights | Hyperparameter tuning + small architecture search | Training panel |
| Run Monte Carlo | Simulates 10,000 outcomes against historical data; tail-risk summary | Backtesting panel |
| Improve Calibration | Brier-aware probability adjustment (Platt / isotonic) | Evaluation panel |
| Suggest Features | LLM proposes 3-5 new feature engineering ideas | Feature picker |
| Diagnose | Explains why your model is underperforming | Anywhere a model is loaded |
| Auto-tune | Re-trains end-to-end with proposed better hyperparams | Training panel |
How a Sharp call works
- You click the button (e.g., Optimize Weights).
- The system invokes the Claude API with the current model state and a structured tool schema.
- A modal appears showing a headline delta (e.g., "Brier: 0.241 → 0.226"), a what-changed view (architecture diff, feature list, hyperparams), and a projected improvement bound.
- You click Accept (applies the change to your working model) or Reject (closes the modal; quota still consumed).
You're always in the loop. Nothing changes silently.
Quotas
- Free: 1 Sharp call per week (resets every Monday in your local timezone, no rollover)
- Weekly: 0 Sharp calls (Weekly is a live-picks tier, not a Sharp call quota — top up at $1/call if you want one)
- Premium: 25 Sharp calls per month, rolling forward up to 50 if unused
- $1/call top-up: available to every tier as overflow (no subscription required)
Free users get 1 Sharp call per week (resets every Monday). Premium gets a monthly quota that rolls over up to 2× the monthly amount — so if you skip a month, your unused calls carry forward, but indefinite hoarding is capped. Anyone — including free and Weekly users — can buy single Sharp calls for $1 each at any time, no subscription needed. Top-up balance is held separately from your monthly quota and never expires.
Monthly quota resets on the 1st of each month, in your local timezone. Weekly free calls reset every Monday.
4. The Consensus product
This is potentially the most valuable thing on the platform. Every house model contributes to the Sharksnip Consensus — the weighted aggregate of what dozens of independently-trained ML models think about the same slate.
Every dot is a real model prediction logged against the real outcome. Cherry-pickers don't survive contact with the live track record.
Weighting
Models aren't averaged equally. Better track records earn more weight:
- Verified Sharp models (90+ days, top 10% calibration, 500+ predictions) → 5× weight
- Established models → 2× weight
- Standard models → 1× weight
- Probationary (new) → 0.25× weight
- Excluded (sub-50% calibration on resolved bets) → 0× weight
We cap any single model at 5% of total Consensus weight, so the signal can't be dominated by one popular model.
How buyers see it
- Free / Weekly: top consensus pick per slate
- Premium: full Consensus across all games and sports, dispersion analysis, divergence-from-market alerts, custom slicing, full historical track record, and rate-limited API access
What we won't do
We don't sell Consensus to sportsbooks. Period. Doing so would close the asymmetry between books and bettors on the wrong side. Your data never goes to operators.
Schedule strength backs every "look-ahead" pick. DET / BAL / BUF aren't winning the implied-total race by accident.
5. Pickem (multi-book line shopping)
If you play DFS-style pickem (PrizePicks, Underdog Pick 6, DraftKings Pick 6), Sharksnip aggregates them into a single interface. You see:
- The same prop across multiple books
- Which book has the best line
- Which book has the best payout multiplier
- Affiliate-tracked direct deeplinks to place the bet
We don't take a cut of your bets — we make money via sportsbook/DFS site affiliate fees when you sign up. The line shopping is free for you and funded by the books.
We've integrated Kalshi (CFTC-regulated prediction market) as a hedge against state-by-state pickem regulations. As regulators continue to crack down on against-the-house pickem, Kalshi's federally-regulated exchange becomes increasingly important.
6. Account, billing, controls
- Cancel anytime — settings page, no friction. Weekly cancels in one click; Premium cancels end-of-period by default
- Downgrade anytime — your saved models persist, you just lose Sharp calls and live-picks access until you re-upgrade
- Export your data — full export of models, predictions, transaction history
- Two-factor auth — recommended for any account with billing
Questions?
- General: hello@sharksnip.com
- Discord: discord.gg/sharksnip
Or just sign up — the free tier covers most of what's described here.